Well, we lost a few on the way. The effects of fatigue and the lure of Halloween parties meant that some of our teams didn’t make it to the finish line. However, a good time was had by all and I’ve never seen so much pizza eaten by so many so quickly. The pizza company had to send two cars to deliver all 40. And it all got eaten…

This morning at 7:30 Simon and I went around with a camera and got presentations from all the teams of their games. The videos will be up tomorrow so you can see for yourself how just how good they are. We had some especially impressive solutions from First Year teams who, with only five or so weeks of C# under their belt, produced some highly playable results. Then, at 9:00 sharp the three judges, Warren, Neil and Simon watched the top ten teams and picked the winners. Which was so difficult we had to award two second prizes.

Judges and videos

You’d think they’d look pleased with prizes of this quality….

This is the team that won the award for best interpretation of their Three Things. “Tactical Nuclear Penguins”, made up of

Josh Crowther,

Alex Beamer and

Dan Burns had to make something from “Funky, Robot, goes underground”. And make something they did. An underground exploring robot agent working down through caverns to fight the devil no less. Hooked up with great dance move beat matching action and coming to Windows Phone Marketplace near you soon.

The first Second Place team, if you see what I mean, “The Double A's”.

Anthony Quinn and

Aaron Ridge produced a fast moving, pretty much market ready for Windows Phone take on “Extreme Hamster in a Graveyard”. Great work, even if they couldn’t keep their eyes open at the end.

This is the second, Second Placed, team. “I chose this weekend over Battlefield 3” , aka

Lindsay Cox,

Devon Hansen,

David Hart and

Michael Bumby. Their game based on “Gun-toting, Volcano, in Space” combined Bejewelled style action with a sideways blast-em-up which had the player matching threes to arm Space Marines attacking the Volcano. Lots of guns, and lots of toting. Great work guys. And don’t worry, we’ll have Lego prizes for all of you once we’ve been down to ToysRUs.

The Winners, with their prizes.

The Winners were praised by the judges for producing a game for Windows Phone that was good enough to sell right now, with delightful graphics, a well honed mechanic and good adherence to the theme. And you could slice the moon in half. These guys are making a bit of a habit of winning, having nabbed the prizes in the last competition too. “The Infamous Two Sirs”,

robmiles.com

Rob Miles is technology author and educator who spent many years as a lecturer in Computer Science at the University of Hull. He is also a Microsoft Developer Technologies MVP. He is into technology, teaching and photography. He is the author of the World Famous C# Yellow Book and almost as handsome as he thinks he is.